Free And Spontaneous Acts Of The Human Spirit--Chomsky

Free And Spontaneous Acts Of Inquiry Through Self-Expression

Chomsky's concept of "innate qualities of mind" must itself be understood as a
form of the creative aspect of mind for, in his analysis of deep structure and
surface structure, he describes a system of rules for generating sentences and
the sorts of words that may replace any given word in a sentence, in the context
of a creative process. He says: (Human language)..."is free to serve as an
instrument of free thought and self-expression. The limitless possibilities of
expression constrained only by rules of concept formation and sentence
formation, these being in part particular and idiosyncratic but in part
universal, a common human endowment."[Ibid. p. 29]

For Chomsky, the deep structure that expresses the meaning of the sentence is
common to all languages. It is the transformation rules that rearrange, replace,
or delete items of a sentence that differ from one language to the next. In
conjunction with language's deep and surface structures these transformation
rules come together in the form of the "organic" nature of language in which,
according to Chomsky, all the parts are interconnected and the role of each
element is determined by the generative processes that constitute language's
underlying form. Language, from Chomsky's point of view, even though it is
conditioned upon maturational processes, and interaction with the social and
physical environment, is understood to be free from stimulus control as it
permits the spontaneous activity of inquiry and self-expression. Chomsky, in
this sense, if not totally successful, at least attempts to secure in his
structuralist interpretation of language, a place for the free and spontaneous
acts of the human spirit.